On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 08:53:17PM -0800, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
"Creating an HTML browser and a Web browser are two different things. The first one just needs to do the job right and parse HTML correctly, the other one just has to be able to render web pages in any possible mean. These are two different beasts and targets --unfortunately."
For some other commentary on the effects of buggy HTML, you might be interested in some recent postings on Surfin' Safari: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_01.html Dave Hyatt has a series of posts on how to best handle XML errors, and he talks about the difficulty of getting WebCore to handle all the broken HTML filling the web today. One of his key points: "The #1 reason that HTML pages render incorrectly in alternate browsers is because of differences in error handling and recovery." He describes his experiences trying to make Safari handle broken HTML the same way IE does (much as IE originally had to handle broken HTML the same way Netscape did). His main point is about XML error handling (specifically, if all XML browsers insist on well-formed documents from the start, no one will have to deal with the nightmare of different error-correction schemes), but he has some interesting comments on dealing with broken HTML. Kelson Vibber www.hyperborea.org